Gaza is not only a story of buildings reduced to rubble. It is a story about what happens when the physical conditions of urban life—homes, hospitals, universities, roads, water systems, memory and community—are progressively dismantled. There is a word for the destruction of a city that captures something the language of “damage” cannot fully express: urbicide . The term is at the center of Mourad Benguita’s important 2025 research article, “Urbicide in Israel’s War on Gaza: Architecture of Erasure and the Unmaking of Urban Life (2023–2025),” published in Filistin Araştırmaları Dergisi / Bulletin of Palestine Studies . The article examines Gaza not simply as a battlefield but as an urban environment whose physical and social foundations have been subjected to extraordinary destruction. And this distinction matters. Because when a house collapses, we see a destroyed building. When an entire neighborhood disappears, we begin to see something else. When hospitals, schools, unive...